Stephen Hayes reviewed The Sword of Honour Trilogy by Evelyn Waugh
None
4 stars
Guy Crouchback, lonely, divorced, and living in Italy, returns to the UK at the beginning of the Second World War, and tries to do his patriotic duty by joining the army. Because of his age, however, no one will have him. Eventually, though an acquaintance of his father's, he joins the regiment of Halberdiers, and undergoes boring officer training. The war progresses, but nobody seems to want the Halberdiers either.
After training, they have a new commanding officer, who wants them assigned to Hazardous Offensive Operations, for which more training is required. Whenever he seems about to go into active service, Guy Crouchback is sidelined, by accident, injury or illness, or the need for further training for some new task.
This book was originally a trilogy of three novels, and was rewritten into one in the 1960s. While reading it, I wondered how Britain ever managed to win the war, …
Guy Crouchback, lonely, divorced, and living in Italy, returns to the UK at the beginning of the Second World War, and tries to do his patriotic duty by joining the army. Because of his age, however, no one will have him. Eventually, though an acquaintance of his father's, he joins the regiment of Halberdiers, and undergoes boring officer training. The war progresses, but nobody seems to want the Halberdiers either.
After training, they have a new commanding officer, who wants them assigned to Hazardous Offensive Operations, for which more training is required. Whenever he seems about to go into active service, Guy Crouchback is sidelined, by accident, injury or illness, or the need for further training for some new task.
This book was originally a trilogy of three novels, and was rewritten into one in the 1960s. While reading it, I wondered how Britain ever managed to win the war, as everything seemed to be stifled by red tape. At one level the novel is satirical, making fun of the military bureaucracy. But there is also something authentic behind the satire; this is indeed how many soldiers probably spent the war, with action brief and inconclusive, and much of the time just hanging around waiting for someone, somewhere, to give an order.
So the book is also something of a historical record. Many soldiers left diaries and memoirs, but what they told and what they chose to leave untold varied a great deal. Many may have recorded battles and action, but the logistics of preparing for the action gets omitted. Waugh seems to tell more of the story than most. This is what it was actually like, not in surreal fantasies like [a:Thomas Pynchon|235|Thomas Pynchon|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1344580482p2/235.jpg]'s [b:Gravity's Rainbow|415|Gravity's Rainbow|Thomas Pynchon|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327868134s/415.jpg|866393] or in the story of planning and carrying out of military operations, but in the experience of one soldier, and a few of the people he encountered, buth military and civilian.
I'm not an expert on military history, but some parts that touch on things that I have read about in history books, such as conditions in war-time Yugoslavia, seemed pretty authentic to me.
Guy Crouchback is a Roman Catholic, and so we are given a glimpse of the lost world of pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism, to which [a:Evelyn Waugh|11315|Evelyn Waugh|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1357463949p2/11315.jpg] was a well-known literary convert.
It reminded me in some ways of Waugh's contemporary, [a:Graham Greene|2533|Graham Greene|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1254688603p2/2533.jpg], also a converet to the Roman Catholic Church, whose [b:The power and the glory|3690|The Power and the Glory|Graham Greene|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388210459s/3690.jpg|1036817] reflects on the challenge of being a saint. Guy Crouchback is nothing like the whisky priest in [b:The power and the glory|3690|The Power and the Glory|Graham Greene|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388210459s/3690.jpg|1036817], in either his upbringing, his circumstances or his character. But he faces similar problems of conscience and ethical dilemmas, in which attempts to help others sometimes turn out well, and sometimes disastrously for all concerned.
As it is a concatenated trilogy, it's a long read, and when I finally reached the end, the overwhelming impression was of the futility of war.
